Bob Biswas movie review: Abhishek Bachchan is Kahaani’s eerie hitman in a spin-off that struggles to lift off

Language: Hindi Sambha from Sholay, Kachra from Lagaan, Bob Biswas from Kahaani … when characters who are barely in a film’s story remain memorable, you should know you have watched something special. So not only do the three leads deliver remarkable performances, but you come away from the film remembering even Saswata Chatterjee playing the destined-to-be-iconic Bob Biswas, the eerie undercover contract killer whose total screen time would not add up to many minutes.” In 2021, Bob as played by Abhishek Bachchan is a not-so-eerie, apparently gentle soul who has just woken up from a long coma following a near-fatal accident and has no recollection of his past. Making her on-screen debut here, Samara Tijori – actor Deepak Tijori’s daughter – shows considerable potential in the film’s best-written supporting role, but in the end, the overall takeaway from Bob Biswas is of these characters hovering in the background of Bob’s life but never coming into their own. What I really enjoyed about Bob Biswas is the fact that Bob and his family are Christians – a minority community rarely represented in Hindi cinema since the 1990s – with their religious identity not being used as a plot point and without most of the stereotypical markers Bollywood used to slap on to Christian characters up to the ’90s, barring these two: one line written for a priest in the film harks back to clichéd Hindi film Christians who, unlike real-life Indian Christians, insist on saying “God” instead of “Bhagwan” even while speaking Hindi; and when Mary enters a church, an English song immediately starts playing in the background.